Tag Archives: hot dogs

As covered a few days ago, baseball and insane hot dogs go together like serial killers and women who send love letters to various prisons who have a lot of issues they need to work out. We should tease out that comparison a little bit more, but we’re not going to. Anyway, the point we think we’re trying to make is that, stadiums like to ply baseball fans with booze and food because while baseball can be boring, if you’re drunk and full, you won’t really mind. This has led to a recent explosion in creative, intense, and, well, insane hot dogs throughout the baseball world. And while we’ve talked about hot dogs in Major League Baseball stadiums already, that was really us going easy on the rest of you. Because Minor League Baseball only sustains itself through the unfulfillable dreams of thousands of minimum wage athletes, and ridiculous ballpark gimmicks. If you think of it, Minor League baseball has probably done it! Smash a printer like in the movie Office Space!? Sure! Dress a dog as the bat boy? Why not! Live amputation on the field? Jesus Christ, no, what the living hell is wrong with you!?

Anyway, if you thought that the last article we had about crazy hot dogs, well…no that was pretty crazy. But check this shit out too!

~Your obnoxious seven-year-old nephew who, you have to admit, probably has a bright parody career ahead of him

America invented most of the world’s best sports. Football? That was us. Basketball? Sure, it was by a Canadian, but only because he was being paid by the Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA when he came up with it, because Canadian dollars were still printed on tree bark at the time, and we were responsible for all the changes that make it recognizable as a sport today. Soccer? Nice try, not a real sport, next question.

But of all the excuses for young men (and women!) to vent out the aggression of youth in a competitive and potentially humiliating environment that has been birthed within these borders, only one sport is iconic enough to be known as our national pastime. No, not Mixed Martial Arts, that’s a terrible guess, are you high right now? We’re talking about baseball of course.

You might view baseball as a relic of a simpler age, when men were men, owners were horrific bigots, and amphetamines were just, everywhere, all the time, which would explain why the sport struggles in some markets to maintain its relevancy. It’s a slow-moving game trying to make its way in a fast-paced world, and say what you will about heart palpitations but taking the majority of the workforce off of Speed in the 80’s didn’t really do much for the pace of the game. Major League Baseball teams try to combat the issues implicit with asking some 40,000 Americans to sit very still for three or four hours by making a day at the ball game a full entertainment and gastronomical experience. This involves a gallons of watered down beer and, more recently, absurd, amazing American culinary disasterpieces for us to shove in our faces and slink into our chairs to ride out our food coma contently watching yet another 1-2-3 inning.

Sure, we could go on about crazy nachos served in miniature baseball hats, or giant cups of frozen sugar (okay, so maybe malt cups aren’t exactly a new development) but let’s be real here. This is America’s sport, we’re going to need to talk about America’s food. America’s best, most absurdly adaptable, most occasionally unnecessarily expensive food. Let’s get to it.

“I like my hot dogs like I like my women—concrete physical proof that I lead a shallow, superficial existence.”

~Rich people who spend more than $100 on hot dogs

America, let’s take a moment to talk about hot dogs. They’re great, right? Pretty much anywhere you go, you’re going to find a great hot dog with its own unique flavor profile and style that hopefully doesn’t involve ketchup because if your hot dog involves ketchup then everyone involved in its preparation and consumption has the taste buds of a six-year-old, but we digress.

Hot dogs are wonderful. They’re delicious, gloriously unhealthy, satisfying, and most of all…expensive?

*Record scratch!*

No! Of course they’re not! If you’re spending more than five dollars for a hot dog, you’re a chump, and if you’re raising your eyebrows and saying, “Five? Try two bucks, Rockefeller” in response to that five dollar figure, well, we wouldn’t argue with you on that point, we’d just point out that certain hot dogs of the jumbo and foot long variety at some of the best hot dog stands around can justabout get away with charging that much. But to your larger point, yes, we agree with you. Hot dogs are supposed to be cheap, and delicious. Cheap. And delicious.

Unfortunately, well, you know. Rich people exist.

Pictured above, a rich person with their pet oil tycoon.

We’re not talking about the standard kind of rich person, who has multiple mansions and cars and personal servants and, like, a McDonald’s in their house like that one scene we all remember from the Richie Rich movie. No, we’re talking about the kind of rich people who either come from money so old they don’t understand how much things are supposed to actually cost in the real world, or people who are so amazed that they’re rich that they need to do everything in their power to let everyone know, “Hey, look at me, look at how much money I have!” like a seven-year-old boy who just learned how to back-flip into the pool. “Why aren’t you guys looking I just bought a piece of JFK’s skull!”

Now, admittedly, there are a lot of hot dogs that cost way more than they should, and a surprising amount of them sold at baseball stadiums. But we’re not here to shame the people who spend $29 on a hot dog, or $50 on a hot dog. No, we’re not going getting out of bed to write about any hot dog unless it costs more than $100, because we really want to drive home the absurdity of how much these people are paying for the right to brag about how much they are able to spend on a single goddamn hot dog.

~The, like, four New Yorkers who actually were upset that the New York-style hot dog was so low on this list

When we began our trek through America’s regional hot dogs, we were legitimately worried. We had just finished writing about 11,000 words talking about long bread sandwiches, and it literally tore families apart and drove half of our staff to insanity. And we were going to immediately follow that nightmare up with a systematic breakdown of hot dog styles? Did we have a death wish outside of our normal “eating and drinking so much that interventions pretty much have become a part of our weekly schedule” death wish?

As it turns out, the task wasn’t quite so daunting. Most hot dog styles follow a pretty basic blueprint. Talking about the different regional kinds of, say, chili dogs requires about as much research as talking about various pizza toppings. New Jersey wanted to put chili on their hot dog. Georgia puts their chili dog in a bowl. Pennsylvania likes to name things from Pennsylvania after Texas. It’s not exactly academic research, but it is hot dogs, so it’s still worth our attention our affection. And these four hot dogs remaining are the ones we love the most. So let’s dig in.

We’ve been chugging along with our hot dog series here, which has been surprisingly much less traumatic than our sandwich series. Most regional hot dog styles exist, and even if we can’t come up with a good origin story, we can at least tell you, “this hot dog has these ingredients. People eat them to feel happy.” And that makes us happy. And it makes all of us fat. Oink oink oink, let’s eat some more hot dogs.

Um. Okay so maybe it’s warping our minds a little bit. But no matter. More hot dogs to shove into the expanding maw that is your stomach!

Since we’re gluttons for punishment (or, honestly, just regular gluttons) we’ve decided to talk to you about every regional hot dog in America. It turns out, there are a lot of places that claim their own style of hot dogs, and most of them adhere to the philosophy of “just douse it in chili,” which honestly, we fully support. If you have a tube of unhealthy, delicious meat, covering that with even more delicious, unhealthy meat is pretty much the definition of an American impulse. And so we continue onward into the sodium-enriched world of American hot dogs.

“We will eat enough hot dogs that our blood type will become ‘Nitrates’ and then we will eat some more.”

~AFFotD Official Credo

Recently, we at AFFotD painstakingly researched over 25 different long rolled sandwiches in America over the course of 11,000 words and four articles. We learned a lot during that delicious (though at times, excruciating) journey—mainly that it takes most wives and husbands about four hours of listening to a writer drunkenly talk about sub sandwiches before they take the kids and go spend a week at their parents’ place. While it’s all well and good to spend your time writing about submarine sandwiches and Italian beefs, when you try to list every type of sandwich in existence you end up scrapping the bottom of the internet to find anything at all that explains why “sarney” is in the dictionary as a type of sandwich, or why whiskey doesn’t always chase the demons away. After we ran ourselves ragged trying to write about every sandwich, we were pleased with our results, but swore an oath that we would never again take on such a daunting, impossible task. Unfortunately, we then celebrated the publication of the series by getting really drunk again and thinking of another article suggestion, and since we were hungry, we decided to talk about every kind of regional hot dog in America.

God…goddamn it. We just will never learn.

Anyway, it’s time to delve into the magical tube of nitrates that is the hot dog in all of its wondrous (and occasionally not-so-wondrous) incarnations. Hold onto your hats, America, here’s another multi-part, nation-sprawling series on unhealthy foods.

We’ve made it a habit to go out of our way to tell you about fried foods that most people would consider “impossible” or “an abomination” or “as a professional cardiologist, I think it is criminally irresponsible for you to be consuming this much fried food.” That’s because as soon as we tell you about a new, insane fried food (fried beer, anyone?) some glorious American decides to fry something even more insane (like, say, a frozen margarita).

This is called capitalism (also obesity) and it is the reason why this country is great. It’s with that spirit in mind that we present to you even more American glory, with…

Humanity’s desire to over-season their food directly led to the discover of America. So it seems only fitting that Americans everywhere make it a point to inject their foods with enough sodium to make their cardiologists say, “Please, just…stop.” And when people think of questionable foods that only get their appeal by being the nutritional equivalent of a salt lick, we of course think to the classic American food product and scrambled-eggs-improver, SPAM.

So let’s focus less on the sizzle and more on the chopped pork shoulder meat steak with this American salute to…

SPAM: Fulfilling Your Daily Value of Sodium since 1937

And “Crazy Tasty” for that brief period in the 1990’s where you could get away with saying “Crazy Tasty.”

“I demand to see men force foods down their stomach at dizzying speeds.”

~Marlon Brando (you know, after he sorta started ballooning up)

America has a fascination with overeating. Each day, we hear phrases that invoke our gastronomical upbringings, like “Put your money where your mouth is” “Stuff ‘em like a turkey” or “That sex was almost as good as eating a crate of pudding cups. Almost.”

Yes, Americans love to eat. Maybe it’s because our most fattening foods happen to be the cheapest and most delicious. Maybe it’s because humans evolved with food scarcity, and fat storage was once a sign of survival, which became conflated as a sign of affluence in impoverished nations where obesity is considered an outward indicator of success. Or maybe it’s shut the fuck up and eat, this is America dammit, SUEEEE-WEEEEEEE, SUEEEE-WEEEEEEEE.

So we at the America Fun Fact of the Day have grabbed our bibs, and our glasses of water for dunking, and are here to salute those proud Americans who make a living as Professional Competitive Eaters.

Haha, it says Shaggy Rodgers and Scooby Doo at the bottom. Well done, internet vigilantes.